Peanut Hunt

We had just one hungry Badger checking out all of our garden's peanut stash locations last night and nowhere avoided inspection until the nuts were found and this time they were half way up a tree trunk

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Fox and Badger Trail Part 1

The Fox and Badger trail that passes through our garden is a bit of a night time hot spot at the moment.

Both fox and Badger are foraging for young families which we hope will be out and about on the trail shortly.

The vixen seen here tends to be the early arrival but when the badgers arrive and bull dose their way in they rule the territory.

The Fox can really only wait for the Badger to pass through,   She has been seen nipping his bum while trying to send him on his way but it could be a very dangerous move should she get herself trapped.

Fox, Badger and our Ferrell Cat

Last night was busy in our garden with no less than three Badgers and two fox foraging around their well used trails

The fox were first on the scene just before dark and they posed quite nicely for a few portraits without any particular concern about my use of flash exposure.

The first Badger arrived at the same time as our cat so they had a bit of a stand off until the badger got within two feet at which time the cat wisely decided to back-off and once the cat was out of the way the badger continued foraging around the garden.

Foraging at Night

Before the recent bad weather conditions I built a new tree trunk prop in my garden to try to enhance the spectacle of foraging fox and badgers that visit on a nightly basis and last night I got my first chance to use it.

Both of these subjects tend to visit in the first hour or so after dark so quite often bump into each other.

The meeting is not friendly between these rivals who both tend to nip at each other from behind and on one occasion after receiving a bite to its back leg the Badger double back-heeled the Fox several feet into the air.

Since then the Fox tends to come in earlier to forage then backs off when the more powerful Badger arrives and returns very quickly once it has gone to clean up any missed tit bits.

Badger at full stretch

We all tend to think of rather rotund Badger images being of them trundling along the ground foraging for their prey so I decided to complete a bit of an exercise over a couple of nights to check out their true reach capabilities.

I placed a few peanuts in harder to reach locations at various heights above ground level and snapped away as the badger gradually reached higher and higher,   I  was impressed when at a stretch in the image above this Badger finally reached nuts placed on a tree stump 80cm/32 inches above ground level,

So in the long and the short of it Badgers appear to have quite poor vision but they do seem capable of following the scent of a peanut and reaching it in many hard to find locations around our garden and they are a joy to watch foraging.

Laid Back Brock

Only one Badger showed before I went to bed last night but it was super relaxed and trundled into our garden like it owned the place.

It quickly found a scattering of peanuts on a rustic wooden seat and laid down to steadily munch its way through them.

When it had finally exhausted the supply instead of just stepping down from the very low seat it surprised me by reversing back along picking off any nuts that it might have missed on the way along It finally popped up onto the boundary bank that it had come from and went happily on its way.

It is good to see such a clean, healthy and photogenic looking Badger displaying its behaviour instead of belly-up at the road side as is only too often the case any morning here in Cornwall,